This will be short, and I’m sorry it’s a day late … when I preach at the real deal on Sundays it just wipes my brain out, I’m sorry to say. Anyway, you can find Sunday’s sermon on the CHT website. It’s an all purpose call to learn to walk in God’s reality.
But while I was pondering that, I made these notes about what it means to be a gay Christian? It is at once easy and hard. It is easy, because being God’s own is easy. It is hard, because being a gay person in a church that has for a couple of centuries made us out as demons is hard. As usual in life, as usual in gay life, it involves the ability to live into different realities, sometimes all at once. We have to know that God has made us gay on purpose. God has even made us vital and gay on purpose. The way we live together has an effect on all of society, all of creation, that God has intended. It loosens things up, it makes things happier, it makes the rainbow more generously accepting of diversity. We show the others how it is supposed to be. That is why God has made some of us, even many of us, gay. And some of us have been made gay so we can make families together. I know that God called me and Brad together to be one. So what do we do with all of these different realities?
Well, if we’re clever, we celebrate them, we embrace them, we rejoice in them. Frankly, every time I go to dinner at the Venture Inn in Philadelphia, or every time I sit at the Engel van Amsterdam on the Zeedijk and watch the joyous parade of gay humanity I celebrate the glorious diverse world that God saw that I was born into. And I think that is our job too, to rejoice in our diversity, to celebrate our multiple realities. Go forth and rejoice then. Celebrate being gay and Christian.
And one more thing—remember to walk in love. Because that is how we reach God’s kingdom, that is how we walk into God’s reality, that is how we leave our own selfish reality behind. Walk always in love my friends.
©2011 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.
*Proper 25 Year A RCL, Leviticus 19: 1-2, 15-18, Psalm 1, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, Matthew 22:34-46
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 